The Ghosts of Christmases Past
I remember my dad standing in the hallway near the front door while my mother would roll up the sleeves of his Banlon shirt to show more of his muscles, I guess. Or maybe that was just the style around 1960. My father worked the second shift as a drill press operator at Bendix in Eatontown, New Jersey, on Route 35, and he was getting ready to go to work. This was the ritual.
Bendix sponsored an art contest every year for their employees at Christmas. I was young then, so I really didn’t know much other than I remember my dad creating beautiful drawings using pastels, and entering the contests during those years. I think one of his drawings won a ribbon one Christmas. This was the only time I can think of where he exhibited his artistic talent with something other than wood.
The Count Basie Center for the Arts is now a happening place on Monmouth Street in Red Bank New Jersey. It’s owned by the Monmouth County Arts Council and reopened as the Count Basie Theatre in the early 1980s. It’s a venue where you may have been entertained by Bruce Springsteen or Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes over the years.
But when I was four or five years old it was known as the Carlton theater, Reade’s Carlton to be exact, a beautiful old theater built in the 1920s first for Vaudeville shows, then transformed into a movie theater.
Every Christmas season, Bendix would host a Christmas program for the children of Bendix employees. I have memories of standing in a very long line of families that wrapped around the corner and down a long Red Bank block in the cold patiently waiting for my turn to enter the lobby and get a bag of snacks, and I think, a small gift. Then we watched a movie, the only one I remember was Walt Disney’s Pinocchio.
My dad would give up his drill press and Bendix and go on to work as a union carpenter in those early years of the 1960s, so I only remember a couple of those Bendix Carlton Christmases. I seem to recall three of the drawings he submitted to the Bendix contests. I was able to salvage one of them, though he had cut part way through it with one of his saws. Saws and woodworking tools were much more associated with my dad than colored pastel pencils, so having at least a cut-down version of one of his Christmas drawings is pretty special.
The ghosts, the memories of this Christmas past writing, were 1960ish. My brother Gary was born in May 1961 so, at this point, he is a ghost of a Christmas future I suppose. The photo below was date stamped Jan 1960 so I think it was from Christmas 1959 when I was three and half. I must have asked Santa for a gun that year.
The photo below is from an even earlier Christmas, 1957 maybe? I am the little pudgy kid in the middle. I must have asked Santa for a car that year. Maybe I will ask Santa for a car again this year.
